The Crawler 2. Painting

Photorealistic insect painting of the blue scarab beetles. I channel my enthusiasm for the amazing characteristics of animals by rendering them with academic oil painting techniques on canvas. The background is beige/cream color. I was fascinated by their amazingly beautiful blue/green metallic color. They look like gemstones to me. The beetle is crawling towards the hole on the ground. I believe that the object of the "hole" has a mysterious atmosphere. It could indicate the birth or the end, either way. This painting has a surrealistic atmosphere because of the hole. In Ancient Egypt, the dung beetle now known as Scarabaeus sacer was revered as sacred. The Egyptians saw the scarab as a symbol of renewal and rebirth. The beetle was associated closely with the sun god because scarabs roll large balls of dung in which to lay their eggs, a behavior that the Egyptians thought resembled the progression of the sun through the sky from east to west.